From: Mariza Costa-Cabral <cabral@gkss.de>

Childhood in East Timor: Mortality rate is 124 per thousand [for children under 5 u.o.]

Unauthorized, amateur translation of the article

Lisbon, 11 December 2002 (Lusa) - East Timor has a mortality rate for children less than 5 years old of 124 for every 1,000 births, which ranks it in 36th place in the list of countries with the highest mortality rates, states a UNICEF report released today.

Entitled "Situacao Mundial da Infancia/2003" [TN: possibly: "State of World Childhood/2003"], the document analyses a series of data on East Timor and 192 other developing nations (...).

The mortality rate for children under one year of age is 85 in a thousand.

Although the study provides health data for most developing countries, such as data on HIV/Aids, nutrition and education, in the case of East Timor it reports no such data because they are not available.

The study states that the East Timorese population under 18 years old (375 thousand people) corresponds to one-half of the population (750 thousand people), and that there are 90 thousand children under 5 years of age.

The annual population growth rate between 1979 and 1990 was one percent and has dropped 0.1 percent in the last decade.

The percentage of urban population was 8.0% in 2001.

In the 1970s, the raw mortality rate was 24 per thousand and dropped to 14 per thousand in 2001. The birth rate also dropped from 45 per thousand in the 1970s to 25 per thousand in 2001.

Life expectancy in East Timor rose from 39 to 49 years of age in the last three decades.

Concerning women [fertility], data as scarce, but point to the prevalence of contraceptive use by 27%, coverage of pre-natal care by 71% [TN: unclear what this means], and to 26% of births being assisted by technical qualified people.

For East Timor, only one economic indicator is mentioned, that of the entry fluxes of the "Official Assistance to Development", which were about 233 million dollars (about the same in Euros) in year 2000.

JSD Lusa/End

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